Beyond the Anglosphere 2025: Books from Peru and Serbia

A few years ago, Senses of Cinema became an internationally produced journal with editors beyond Australia. This partially changed the scope of sights in our team, reflecting the already rich set of inputs feeding the journal which are, nevertheless, mostly framed by English-language academia and critique. Since we receive proposals of books for review in languages other than English from time to time, and us as editors feel compelled towards different approaches – or epistemologies – to film and audiovisual media, in local and in global terms, we held an editorial discussion and decided to choose a few worthy books to review briefly once a year, trying to make visible some great works and interesting discussions that might fuel, be it by proximity, be it by distance, thinking about moving images.

 For this, our first exercise, two of our editors chose the books. One published in late 2024 in Peru, but promoted this year, and one published in Serbia recently.

Isaac León Frías, Los trances de los cines de América Latina y el Caribe: De los años setenta al fin de siglo (Trances in the Cinemas of Latin America and the Caribbean) (Lima: Universidad de Lima, 2024).

Despite being one of the key film critics in the Spanish-speaking world, Isaac León Frías’ name is not very well known beyond South America, and by that I mean “South America” as we conceive it in the Hispanic world – that is excluding Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. The visible beginnings of his career as an editor and critic appeared in Hablemos de Cine (Let’s Talk About Cinema), the Peruvian journal he directed for 20 years (1965-1985), a militant endeavour both in aesthetic and political terms, with strong emphasis in Latin American cinema, though never ignoring the rest of the world. Hablemos de Cine, just like most Latin American thinking of its time, exhibited a strong compromise between exposing the structural inequities of this cultural area (reflecting the very same pursuit the most outstanding local filmmakers of the period followed) while also conversing face to face with, and sometimes against, the key European and North American discussions. And in an unlikely case for the Spanish-speaking world, culturally centred in a triad of countries (Argentina, Mexico and Spain – with a 20-year period, roughly from the ‘60s to the ‘80s, also including Cuba), the publication impacted South American critics, filmmakers and film scholars.

In our territories, film criticism has been and is mostly a devotional effort. This means León has made a living as a university professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Perú and the Universidad de Lima, teaching Film Language and History. And those two facets, or that integral yet dislocated intellectual totality, led him in this century to write a series of books historicising, theorising, analysing Latin American cinema. The first step in this quest was El nuevo cine latinoamericano de los años sesenta (The New Latin American Cinema of the 60s, 2013); the latest is Los trances de los cines de América Latina y el Caribe (Trances in the Cinemas of Latin America and the Caribbean, 2024).

Trances… is at once an expected and an unexpected book. 

The expected side shows a masterful knowledge of Latin American cinemas in the second half of the 20th century. Everything seems to be there, from Mexico to Haiti, in a historic but rhizomatic, or better quantic, prose: following a straight line yet moving to the first half of the 20th century or to the 21st when pertinent, and thus evaluating authorial oeuvres and industrial productions (private or state-sponsored), the political filmic and extra-filmic contexts, the labels local critics and scholars use. The result is a very complex historic-critical edifice conscious of the necessity of emphasizing all the pieces of a dissimilar panorama, when the most “powerful” cinematic traditions (Argentina, Brazil, Mexico) could easily dominate, erasing the medium ones and obviously the most ill-fated (Central America and the Caribbean, according to the book’s organization). His knowledge is astounding, and his decades as spectator lead, from time to time, to forgotten or lost films.

Anyway, the unexpected side offers León’s main contribution to the historiography and critique of Latin American cinema: he claims it is absolutely urgent to develop national and regional industries that would have an impact on wide local audiences. That is consistent with León’s own research – he also wrote a book on the two regional classic industries, Mexico and Argentina, Más allá de las lágrimas (Beyond Tears, 2018) – and with his long and productive discussion with Octavio Getino and Paulo Antonio Paranaguá, but not with the vantage point of the majority of the established scholars and critics, who usually degrade everything outside our auteur film. Moving, for example, from local genres to great filmmakers without prejudice sets a new research path, maybe incomplete but stimulating.

In Latin American film studies and criticism, we are formally and ethically anti-imperialists but we easily, blindly replicate without much analysis or critical thought the discourses coming from Europe or the United States, in a sort of self-submission. And looking at productions reflecting the imperfect aesthetics and shocking values – for the intelligentsia, that is – of popular cinemas with the same interest and detail as “high culture” remains largely a pending matter. Getino and Paranaguá in film studies, and the better-known cultural theorist Jesús Martín Barbero, among others, preceded León Frías, who nevertheless widened provocatively the effort.

Abel Muñoz-Hénonin

Isidora Ilić and Boško Prostran (aka doplgenger), eds., Film i borba: Radna sveska za antikolonijalne pokretne slike (Film and Struggle: A Workbook for Anticolonial Moving Images) (Belgrade: Fakultet za medije i komunikacije, 2025).

The emancipatory energy of Third Cinema is inextricably rooted in a particular time and place – the anti-imperial 1960s and ’70s in Latin America – yet it is thanks to tireless efforts of worldwide custodians such as Belgrade-based media-archivist duo “doplgenger” that the legacies and ideas of liberatory political cinema are kept alive and well, ever-evolving in opposition to contemporary injustices, oppressions, exploitations. As a book committed not only to maintaining the memory of historical media militancy but also (and more importantly) to creatively re-actualize past practices for our present tormented moment, Film i borba: Radna sveska za antikolonijalne pokretne slike (Film and Struggle: A Workbook for Anticolonial Moving Images) is an exemplary work of 21st century Third Cinema theory.

The anthology, edited by Isidora Ilić and Boško Prostran, assembles twelve influential manifestos, statements, announcements, and declarations from the global history of committed imagemaking, many translated here for the first time in any of the (ex-)Yugoslav languages. From Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas’s landmark “Hacia un tercer cine” (“Towards a Third Cinema,” 1969) and Med Hondo’s astute “What Is the Cinema for Us?” (1979) to the Niamey Manifesto of African Filmmakers (1982) and Selma Baccar, Heiny Srour, and Magda Wassef’s uncompromising “Pour l’auto-expression de la femme arabe” (“For the Self-Expression of the Arab Woman,” 1978), doplgenger’s volume diagrams anti-colonial cinematic thought in its geographic and intellectual richness, encompassing both canonical and unjustly forgotten contributions. Some opt for rumination, while others – indeed most – are incendiary calls to action.

Yet the edition, published by Singidunum University’s Faculty of Media and Communications (Fakultet za medije i komunikacije) in August this year, is remarkable for at least another reason. In its originary 1960s inception, Third Cinema was nothing if not a mode of filmmaking that took seriously the particular (yet transcontinentally shared) material-economic conditions in and against which cineastes existed and struggled. It is this attention to (neo)colonial capitalism in its felt, all-too-real vicissitudes that distinguished Tricontinental film praxis from European art cinema, for which the lived realities of exploitation and extraction were never anything more than a distant abstraction. Extending Third Cinema’s method of materially situated (but internationally transferable) critique into their own conditions of existence, doplgenger open Film and Struggle with an illuminating and unequivocal introduction: “Serbia’s petrified society is sharply divided along class lines. Deregulation and lawlessness eroded a system in which violence became a structural phenomenon. The processes of selling off the country’s territory and population resembled the colonial and neocolonial global processes of the past two centuries” (p. 12).¹ 

Tracing a lineage from 1800s imperial conquest to today’s structural position of “peripheral Serbia as Europe’s landfill,” Ilić and Prostran demonstrate and enact Third Cinema’s continued relevance for intervening in geopolitical contexts ruled not by law or its people, but by the overbearing hand of capital and its henchmen. While the 200-page monograph would benefit from a closer examination of socialist Yugoslavia’s own abundant ties to Global South revolutionary movements – the Yugoslav-Mozambican co-production O Tempo dos Leopardos (Vreme leoparda or Time of the Leopards, 1985) being only the most infamous example – Film and Struggle is an invaluable addition to both local, national, and regional (Southeast European) progressive media discourse. By activating anti-colonial imagemaking as something other than a nostalgic reminiscence – and instead as an actually existing practice of the here and now – this smartly curated “workbook” understands Third Cinema in its original, radical idea: as a mode of social engagement that erupts precisely when and where existential conditions are so dire as to be in need of immediate transformation. In this, the volume’s import is today nothing short of global.

Nace Zavrl

If you would like to propose a non-English language book for 2026, follow the instructions on our proposals section.

Endnotes